The interior of the house was not exactly classic Elizabethan. There was a dome of reinforced concrete, a battery of TV monitors, and a massive descending stairwell. A silver-haired man in his late fifties, wearing the battle-dress uniform of a Brigadier, led the Royal group into the building and down the stairwell. On the first level down, they walked through a rounded doorway which had a massive, two-foot-thick steel door with a rotating plate in the centre, and a large dial, not unlike the door to a bank vault. The door was open, and secured back.

The party went down to the second level and through a second, identical doorway, then down to the third level and through yet another identical doorway. They came into a very large and brightly lit operations room of open-plan design. There were over one hundred desks in the room; each desk had two telephones and one computer terminal.

The Queen then parted company with the rest of her family who were taken on down into their living quarters, and she was led through the back of the operations room, down a short corridor, and into a room hung completely with maps and charts. In the centre of the room was a huge rosewood table, of elongated oval shape, around which sat the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and a battery of advisors.

In an office further down the same corridor, Fifeshire sat, shrouding himself in cigar smoke and firing his words through the cloud. I wondered if, perhaps, he was trying to simulate giving orders in battle conditions.

‘Did you have a good journey?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘flying in choppers through thick fog is not my scene.’

‘Nor mine. Damned foolish. Did you notice the wind getting up?’

I nodded. ‘Westerly.’

A massive cloud of Havana smoke appeared in front of my eyes, and his voice boomed through it. ‘You’re wondering what the devil is going on, so I’ll tell you everything first, and then you can ask questions.’

As the smoke lifted, I half-expected that he might have disappeared, but he was still there.

‘The Americans, the Canadians, the French, and the Spaniards: they all found AtomSled’s fuel bundles, in position in various reactors, ready for loading into the cores. Now for the bad news: at the Chinon reactor in France, at eleven o’clock last night, four men carrying explosive charges were arrested. A Spanish reactor at Lemoniz went critical at one o’clock this morning: there were no B-marked fuel bundles at Lemoniz. According to their latest report, the reactor is now completely out of control.’ Fifeshire took the cigar away from his mouth for some moments, and I could see his face was very white. ‘Do you know what this means?’

I nodded. I knew what it meant. I said something I don’t normally say when in the presence of a superior. I said, ‘Oh shit.’